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Why we're not emergent

Emergent detergent

WHY WE’RE NOT EMERGENT
By Kevin Deyoung and Ted Kluck
Moody Publishers. 256 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 0 802 458 346

The recent book Love Wins by Rob Bell, which has caused such a stir with its peddling of a stylishly hip universalism, comes from the stable of the so-called ‘emergent church’.

This book by Kevin Deyoung and Ted Kluck gives a readable and telling assessment of the emergent church (EMC). The joint authorship works well. Deyoung is a young, theologically astute pastor from Michigan. Ted Kluck is a sports journalist with a more story-telling approach. They write alternate chapters and provide a well-balanced critique.

The Deyoung chapters pick up on key areas of truth. The EMC has bought into postmodernism which abhors propositional truth and ‘straight-line thinking’. It makes much of religious experience and mystery. It accuses evangelicals of ‘arrogant certainty’. In doing so, says Deyoung, it has undermined the knowability of God. EMC rejoices in the journey rather than arriving at any conclusions. It actually leaves us with a God who cannot speak. EMC downgrades the Bible. It is just one voice to which we listen as we seek God within community.

Again, EMC says that it is our relationship with Jesus that matters not knowing doctrines and truths about him. But Deyoung rightly asks how you can have a relationship with anybody of whom you know nothing that is true. In fact, EMC loves such false dichotomies. ‘The whole movement seems to be built on reductionistic, even, modernistic, either-or categories’, writes Deyoung with irony. ‘They pit information versus transformation, believing versus belonging, and propositions about Christ versus the person of Christ. The emerging church will be a helpful corrective against real, and sometimes perceived, abuses in evangelicalism when they discover the genius of the “and” and stop forcing us to accept half-truths.’

In some senses, though Deyoung has the theological power, Kluck’s chapters are even more devastating. Our street-wise brother Ted does a fine job in exposing many of the EMC’s leaders as rather self-regarding posy bloggers, concerned with style and packaging but little else. Eg. one emergent church describes a spiritual retreat that is ‘an immersion of your senses, emotions, body and intellect as we quest to explore our connection to God’. Why not just call it ‘Discovering Spiritual Maturity’? asks Kluck. The title of his last chapter says it all: ‘Why I don’t want a cool pastor’. A movement that’s concerned with ‘cool’ was just bound to produce a book like Love Wins, wasn’t it?

John Benton